As Twitter Has Gone to Algorithms – Our Reach and Engagement Has Been Killed (UPDATED)

UPDATE: My October Twitter stats are in. And, while I grew my audience by almost 600 followers my tweet reach averaged 0.5%. And I got an average of 1 link click per day. I’m not sure where all the clicks are coming from when my user list on the site says 30 people are visiting, perhaps not clicking from Twitter.com?

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Building a following of over 22k has taken me a long time. My group is tightly focused around content marketing and social media marketing. But when Twitter optimized with their algorithm I lost 97% of my reach. Instead of my people seeing all of my tweets they are now seeing about 3% of them. Sure, Twitter needs to make money, but this is highway robbery. And paying for promoting tweets is like throwing money into the dark web.

Taking a quick look at ads.twitter.com < click the link to see your Twitter Analytics account, I can see what my best tweet was.

That’s a 3% reach. And of course they would like me to pay for the reach. Algorithms are the thing these days. Twitter has joined the bandwagon and now no longer shows you the entire stream of the people you follow. Your twitter feed is now curated by a machine to show you what it thinks you want to see. What tweets are performing best, those will be shown more. And some will be show very little.

Of course my part of the tweet was very light. I was responding to a @thinkprogress tweet and that’s why I got so much action. Let’s look at one of my “content related” tweets.

I have over 22k followers!

That’s a 3% reach. And of course they would like me to pay for the reach. And that’s high, because I got 1 like, 1 click, and 1 retweet. This was a huge engagement for only 663 impressions. Let’s see what one looks like that gets no love to boost it’s “value” in the algorithm.

That folks, is > 1% organic reach.

So, there’s one lesson from this metric. Always LIKE your own tweets. It makes a difference. And never pay for to promote your tweets, it’s throwing money away for reach we used to, and should get for free. Twitter is seeing it’s value marginalized and it’s retention of new users dropping to the lowest point in its history. What’s the problem you ask?

Twitter needs to get back to the basics of why we joined Twitter in the first place, to give our “audience” a stream of our activity and content. Now we are reaching 1% – 3% of our audience and Twitter wants us to pay for reaching our followers. 22k followers, that I worked very hard to acquire, doesn’t get you what you used to.